Jean-Paul Bourdier

At the core of every human being’s life is the question of: “Who am I?” As we grow through life, many of us often identify with our body & mind and skip the dimension of being, which if we test it, is as infinite as this whole universe.

The images I produce act as a portal to reclaim our intimate relationship with the infinite. This is achieved through our primary homes: the bare earth and the bare body. Through the simultaneous use ofperformance art, painting and analog photography, I stage the body in its rawness as it relates to the landscape through situations that recall the magic of being and the nature of Light.

Through the colorful painting of the body I am arching back to the realization that has long been made by physicists and mystics alike, that this body and the earth, while they appear opaque and dense are also entirely made out of light. As we go deeper into the structure of any material, matter remains elusive.

Nothing seems to be more “magical” than light since it travels but has never been tangibly held or found by anyone, nor is it propelled by anything, nor does it stop anywhere, nor does it seem to clearly originate anywhere. Lastly, since light travels at a constant speed, in an otherwise constantly changing universe, perhaps for this reason light in many traditions is seen as godly in nature.

This realization is the seed of the work to be presented: through the bare body painted with the colors of light, I bring humanity back to its fundamental nature, bypassing the usual layers of identity, space and time, and re-contextualize it into being-ness as Light, or “who we really are”.

Through other means, such as presenting the body in flight or having it interact in various ways with the earth, I further elaborate on the nature of “Form being the Formless” (light) while simultaneously evoking our direct kinship with the earth and some of the predicaments humanity faces in our dependence on dualistic thinking.